Featured Comments: Week of 2012 November 11

There hasn't been a post featuring comments in a while because there hasn't been any post that has gotten comments in a while...until this week. This past week, there was one post that got a handful of comments, so I'll repost most of those.

Long-Term Review: openSUSE 12.2 KDE

An anonymous reader shared, "Regarding this: the YaST2 GUI package manager and updater would not work as it would complain about PackageKit... OpenSUSE uses PackageKit, because of the KDE appstore application(called Apper). This constantly looks for updates and intervenes with Yast (very annoying). The solution is simple: remove Apper as soon as possible after every OpenSUSE install. Personally, I never encountered the problems with Okular you described."
Another anonymous commenter had this open question, "long time ago , last time i tried a Desktop linux, i did some simple test, using kde. I Opened a remote SMB share and play a 100 Mb avi. What i had : the system told me it was coping the entire file in /tmp and after that it was going to open it. It did 'not work and copy the entire file in the local system is quite a silly thing. Working on a big company it happen many times a day to open file in remote SMB shares ( linux , Netapp , readyNAs and others. ) If this thing will not be fixed linux on the desktop of a big company can't go much further IMHO. Stefano . Italy."
Yet another anonymous reader provided a response to that: "Next time, try using an application which uses the .gvfs system like Nautilus or from within gnome / xfce and NOT kde. Then you will not need it to be copied first and then played."
Still another anonymous commenter said, "You can remove Apper, but what I've done (with both openSUSE 12.1 and 12.2) is to simply stop Apper Monitor from starting up (Main Menu > Favorites > Configure Desktop > System Administration > Startup and Shutdown > Service Manager -> uncheck the box next to "Apper Monitor"). Then, I think you'll need to restart the session. After doing that, I have had no problems simply using YaST Online Update Also, I read this comment at DistroWatch -- if you don't remove or disable Apper, you may want to check to see if this solves the problem: "The package kit problem can be solved by editing the list of sources. The DVD is left enabled and package kit keeps looking for it." Besides that issue, openSUSE 12.2 looks very good after a couple of months on two different computers."

Thanks to all those who commented on that post. After the middle of this coming week, I will be home for Thanksgiving and will likely be busy with all the associated events there, meaning that I probably won't have much out this week. Also, if you look at the post from this past week, I've said that I probably won't be doing many distribution reviews until possibly IAP. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Long-Term Review: openSUSE 12.2 KDE

I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the 64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as classes have started. Finally, for some reason Blogger decided to delete the content of what I had here, so everything up until "Day 2" is very much paraphrased from memory.

2012 Election

This is just a quick post that tomorrow is the 2012 election in the US. I have voted absentee from my home state. I know a lot of people who are apathetic about voting because they feel like in the face of large corporations and lobbyists, their votes don't mean much. I used to have an apathetic attitude like that too...until SOPA/PIPA got rejected. What I learned from that is that the people still matter; no matter how much corporations may support a particular agenda and no matter how much it seems like a local or state politician has been bought out by special interests, if people like us bombard them with letters to support a particular position that we want, the politicians will always come cowering to us rather than the lobbyists because it is our votes in an election that matter at the end of the day. In short, your vote does count, and democracy is not dead, so get out and vote!